This week Twitter, my favorite social network, announced its advertising model: promoted tweets. Exciting? Maybe, if you are a marketer. If you are an ordinary person, the change doesn’t make a big difference from the status quo.
Although Twitter didn’t have an advertising platform per say, we were already used to advertisements on Twitter. The mere fact that Starbucks and other brands use it to announce special promotions and events is enough. Should I also mention the hundreds of PR and advertising agencies and professionals that use Twitter to promote their clients, most of them without a disclosure until a while ago?
Not only are we used to see advertisements on Twitter, but we are used to see them everywhere. I can’t think of a medium that doesn’t have ads. Actually, I can’t even think of an aspect of our daily lives that isn’t exploited for ads: from bus stops to sidewalks to cell phones we are bombarded with ads every day and we’ve learned to ignore most of them most of the time (read 99.99999999 % of the ads we see 99.999999% of the time).
Will we do the same with promoted tweets? Will we just ignore them as we do with the majority of Facebook ads?
Although I can’t speak of all Millennials, I know that I would notice the promoted tweets. They will be on the top of my search and unless I pay attention and read the text below the actual tweet, I won’t know whether it is a promoted tweet or not. However, the fact that I would notice a promoted tweet doesn’t necessary mean I would follow a brand, become a part of its community, buy its product or do whatever else the tweet is trying to persuade me to do. Nor would I put up with annoying or worthless promoted tweets. Chances are that if I see two of these from the same brand, I would never pay attention to the brand’s promoted tweets, let alone follow it. It is a different question how often I would see promoted tweets in their current format since I, like most people my age, use a Twitter client and rarely go to twitter.com.
What can brands (or anyone else interested) do to take the best advantage of promoted tweets?
- Don’t be annoying!!!
- Don’t ask me to become a fan of your brand on Facebook, or like it when Facebook changes.
- Don’t ask me to provide support or to vote for you in any competition.
- Do provide value to me.
- Do provide value on regular basis, not only once a year.
- Do use promoted tweets to engage with me.
- Do use promoted tweets to be helpful.
- Do use common sense!!!
Millennials, what do you think about promoted tweets? Would you like to add anything else to my list?
Photo Credit: loiclemeur
I have yet to even see a promoted tweet so I'd have to agree with no big deal. It looks like it could be a good medium to engage folks in (Virgin Air jumped right in), but folks like me who follow 500+ folks will probably never notice them
UberTwitter for BlackBerry puts ads and promoted tweets in the feeds, so I'm sort of used to it. You can always tell when its an ad/promoted tweet because of, like you said, the text underneath, and that they look different than regular tweets. I'd hope Twitter would do the same.